• Dran@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Inference is dirt cheap in comparison. Hundreds to thousands of concurrent users can be served by hardware costing in the high-thousands to low-ten-thousands.

    Training those same foundational models is weeks to months of time on tens to hundreds of millions worth of hardware.

    • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yeah—but in theory you only need to train once, while inference costs are ongoing and scale up with usage.

      I guess it’s ultimately a business decision by AI companies to weigh how often retraining is worth the cost.